(Editor's note: This story has been updated since original publication. University of Washington women's studies professor Michelle Habell-Pallan was among the guest curators for American Sabor, an exhibit at Experience Music Project. Her name was inadvertantly omitted initially.)

While in the midst of planning an expansive new exhibit on the history of Latin music in America, Experience Music Project curator Jasen Emmons realized he needed more real estate.

"I thought, 'It's not enough room. This story's so big, we need to double the space,' " he said.

Emmons decided to retire the long-standing Jimi Hendrix exhibit and combine that space with the gallery used for the Bob Dylan exhibit in 2004. "There's no other way we could have done it," he said.

"American Sabor: Latinos in U.S. Popular Music," which opens Saturday and continues through next August, fills 5,000 square feet of space at the interactive music museum, making it the largest exhibit since EMP's blues exhibit in 2003.

Sabor means taste or flavor in Spanish, and it is often used to describe good music. The exhibit explores the profound impact of Latinos on U.S. popular music, from the sounds of rumba in the 1940s through today's banda rap; from Cuban-American musician Desi Arnaz (who fled the Batista revolution in 1933, introduced the conga line, joined Xavier Cugat's band in 1937 and recorded his first hit, "Babaloo," in 1948) to current reggaeton (pronounced reggae-tone) artist Daddy Yankee.

In the 1940s, the "Latin craze" was so huge that it spilled over into the mainstream. Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters had a huge hit in 1946 with "South America, Take It Away," in which they sang: "You beautiful lands below/ Don't know what you began/ To put it plainly, I'm tired of shakin'/ To that Pan American plan."

"American Sabor" explores the cultural forces that shaped the development of Latin music in the major hubs of New York, Miami, San Antonio, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

"When you say Latin music or Latino music, it's such a broad term that I think people have a reaction depending on their background," Emmons said.

"To some, that may mean salsa, to others conjunto music. But I think they'll be amazed at the diversity of it. What you were hearing in New York City is very different from what you were hearing in San Antonio."

Visitors will be able to peruse artifacts, films, an hourlong audio "tour," listening kiosks, a dance video (complete with dance floor for the uninhibited) and interactive displays. In a controlled listening booth, one can hear the tasty sounds of "Angel Baby" by Rosie and the Originals (1960), "Land of a 1,000 Dances" by Cannibal & the Headhunters (1965), "Viva Tirado" by El Chicano (1970) and "No One To Depend On" by Santana (1971).

Reproductions of more than 100 album jackets cover an entire wall, showing the shift in portrayal of Latin artists from exotic and sensual to real individuals, proud of their heritage.

During a tour last week, the buzz of a drill punctuated the quiet as workers put finishing touches on the exhibit. While a two-person crew mounted salsa star Celia Cruz's black, sequined gown on a full-figured mannequin, another worker crawled into a large, transparent plastic display case to wipe down its surfaces.

Locating artifacts for "American Sabor" was unusually challenging. "It was 10 times more difficult than it was for the Dylan exhibit because there were pockets of collectors and each city was separate and there wasn't this network that existed for Dylan," Emmons said.

"Once I gave the secret handshake in the Dylan network, it went around the world. But for this, I'd find the guy in Long Island who had something and he had nothing to do with the guy in L.A."

Emmons and his staff conducted 45 interviews for the oral history section of "American Sabor," the most EMP has ever done for an exhibit.

Carlos Santana, who was 10 when he joined his father's mariachi band as a violinist, talks about yearning to play something different.

"When he's about 11 years old, he says to his father, 'I hate this music, I hate this violin, I hate the smell of this instrument,' " Emmons recounted.

"His father says, 'That's because you're into the blues.' And Carlos says, 'I don't want to be part of this anymore.' "

Santana also talks about playing with older musicians in a Tijuana strip club when he was 12: "I learned that you can play music that'll make a woman strip. But after a while, watching a woman strip is no more sensual than watching someone peel a banana."

Musicians also talked about discrimination.

"They told me that when they moved to the States, it was the first time they had experienced racism, the San Francisco guys in particular," Emmons said.

"They talk about that in-between state where you didn't belong in Mexico and you didn't belong in America."

A&M Records co-founder Herb Alpert, who actually is Jewish and not Latino, had three hit albums in 1966. In his oral history segment, he talks about going to the Tijuana bullfight that inspired the recording "The Lonely Bull." But Alpert couldn't quite capture the excitement of the bullfight until he decided to add the sound effect of more than 30,000 cheering spectators.

"It opened the song, and when he played it for DJs, they went nuts," Emmons said.

"American Sabor" grew out of a collaboration between EMP, KEXP-FM and music scholars at the University of Washington. The guest curators are Puerto Rican ethnomusicologist Marisol Berríos Miranda, associate professor of ethnomusicology Shannon Dudley and women's studies professor Michelle Habell-Pallan.

"The scholars thought that the standard narrative of American popular music is black music and white music and how those two come together -- or don't. They really felt that the contributions of Latino music had been overlooked. It's such an important part of the sound of American popular music that the story needed to be told," Emmons said.

Visitors may be surprised to learn that the cha-cha, a Cuban music style known for its danceable rhythm and repetitive lyrics that became popular in New York City in the 1950s, influenced a diverse array of songs, among them Richard Berry's "Louie Louie," the Rolling Stones' "Get Off of My Cloud" and Shania Twain's "That Don't Impress Me Much."

Mambo, which blends Afro-Cuban rhythms with big band styles and translates roughly as "conversation with the gods," influenced the intro to The Doors' 1967 hit, "Break on Through."

Latino rock bands in the 1960s created novel names, in part to conceal their ethnic backgrounds and fit in with American rock 'n' roll culture, among them Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs, Sir Douglas Quintet, Cannibal and the Headhunters, and ? and the Mysterians (who recorded the Latin-flavored punk song "96 Tears").

The exhibit also explores the hybridizaton of Latin American music styles. "You had the boogaloo era where you had these guys who grew up in New York City, but their parents had come from Puerto Rico or Cuba," Emmons said. "They were listening to their parents music, but they also started listening to R&B and rock 'n' roll and merging those two styles into boogaloo.

"One of our themes is youth innovation, and how young musicians who didn't have any rigid ideas of what was possible were happy to mix-and-match stuff and create something new. Whereas their elders would say, 'You can't do that. You can't mix those two genres. They'd say, 'Why? It sounds good.' "